Except in the real world where wind + solar account for the vast majority of GW added. Nuclear just doesn't matter. It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter. Too little (well barely anything at all), too late.
There's this pesky thing called cost that nuclear proponents just refuse to address. They are all scientific about how nuclear works. How great it is. Etc. But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out, go hand wavy, and generally refuse to talk numbers. You could do this, you could do that. But nobody really likes being put on the spot about what exactly to do for how much.
Not a single dollar sign in this article nor the string "dollar". Or other common currency such as "Euro". There's nothing else to be said about this article. It just completely ignores cost. It's all hand wavy and devoid of facts about cost. Very typical. Must be deeply embarrassing to read such drivel for an actual nuclear physicist with a clue. Guilty by association and it's not a good look. If these are your biggest fans, you are royally screwed.
The whole argument for nuclear evaporates as soon as you bring up cost. Then it's suddenly about such pesky things as $/mwh and delays, budget overruns, etc. And the fact that there are things you can buy and install that have very well known $/mwh cost that work as advertised.
The cost of nuclear today has more to do with the fact that we aren’t building nuclear plants. There are minimum companies with small operations making nuclear reactor technologies for just maintenance of existing ones and military contracts. If we were building new nuclear plants with modern reactors, the costs wouldn’t be a big deal anymore because the production of them would have scaled better.
But instead we’re spending tens of billions on windmills and solar panels that won’t last 15 years or operate well in many regions, including Germany and especially south Germany. This is why Germany is now reliant on France’s nuclear power to handle the majority of its power needs and the citizens are paying massive premiums for it. Not the government.
So maybe we should ignore the pesky cost issue cause we certainly ignored the financial and economic cost consequences of solar and wind.
The argument that costs will come down if we build more nuclear worked in the 1950s, but we know now where that goes now. Build
More nuclear and costs come down. With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents, the public realizes these things can make entire nations uninhabitable if they fail, and then they demand a halt to nuclear, pushing prices back up.
Nuclear prices have baked in the public sentiment on the risk of meltdowns. The prices are efficient.
> With more plants there are inevitably more nuclear incidents
Can we stop making this argument? It is an extremely bad faith argument. There have only been two accidents of commercial reactors in the history of nuclear power that led to the loss of lives. The likely value is well under 10k (<100 directly attributed to Chernobyl). The first was orders of magnitude more dangerous than the second, was early into the development of nuclear power, and was caused by experimentation using a nuclear reactor that the rest of the world refused to use due to the potential for the reactor to fail in exactly the way Chernobyl did. The second, killed a single person, was caused by the largest natural disaster in the region (in all of recorded history), where the science of the day did not think such an event could even happen.
Yes, there's more nuance to this, but we also need to recognize the actual level of danger. These arguments pretend that scientific knowledge has not changed over 80 years. These arguments pretend that there are no deaths and/or environmental concerns with other energy sources (literally every one has these concerns). They ignore the cost of carbon and other environmental damage of the source's lifetime. Most importantly, these arguments pretend that all incidents are equally as dangerous.
Can we please just stop? There are a lot of valid criticisms of nuclear power, but making lazy arguments just results in fighting. Talk about costs, reliance on fuel, the possibility of not even needing them, or any other points (argue with nuance). The public is (sadly) not well informed about nuclear nor most scientific concepts in general, although many members have high confidence in their cursory understanding. (The thesis here applies to a lot of other scientific domains btw, including: climate, health, and even evolution) We need to have real conversations about these issues as there is a lot on the line. Complex issues require complex discussions.
It is quite misleading to only focus on deaths due to nuclear accidents. Fukushima may not have (directly) killed anyone, but the cleanup is hideously expensive (estimates say many hundred billion dollars). Containing Chernobyl costed a few percent of Ukraine's pre-war annual budget. So far, roughly one in a hundred power reactors have blown up. If this is priced in, the economics get even less favorable.
I'm quite sure, but not 100% that the above number does *not* include research reactors. If it makes sense to include those into the statistics is less clear.
Fukushima had three meltdowns (reactors 1-3), and a hydrogen gas explosion that damaged the spent fuel pool of reactor 4. Together with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, this corresponds to roughly 1% of all commissioned reactors suffering catastrophic failure with significant radiation release.
You both are making statistical errors. You've aggregated the data improperly. As I mentioned in the original rant, this calculation throws out the temporal component and thus 80 years of development and research. Safety has greatly increased over the last 20 years, let alone 80.
Yes, and these death-based analysis' also ignore the fact that both Fukishima and Chernobyl could have been much, much worse if major interventions were not made at the right moment. I always think about the Fukishima engineers who got the instruments in the control room to turn on by wiring them up to car batteries. If the team on duty that day was just a little less resourceful, the story gets much worse. Those incidents should be seen as a lower-bound to the danger not an upper bound.
No, we cannot stop talking about the danger of meltdowns, because it is a proven danger, and a uniquely catastrophic one. Approximately once per decade, a nuclear reactor melts down and either does (Chernobyl) or nearly does (Fukishima) make a nation-sized area of earth uninhabitable. Asking people to ignore this fact when they consider building nuclear plants in their region is silly.
Well said. You can browse through the replies in the threads on this post, and see where all the cost questions go unanswered. Cost and the basic economics of trying to run a really expensive power source at a fixed high price over 40+ years when the competition gets cheaper every day. That’s the major why virtually none get built anymore. And it’s not going to change.
Wind and solar are only possible because they use the rest of the grid as effectively a giant battery. When the sun shines and/or the wind blows, someone else needs to reduce the electricity generation. The end result will be that during good weather the price of electricity is zero, and during any other time the price of electricity is high to pay for unused capacity and additional wear and tear on the equipment due to additional power cycling.
We are already seeing this in Germany[1], where electricity prices are also becoming zero[2] during parts of the day. The problem with renewables will become apparent only once the reserves of easily dispatchable electricity generation is used up across Europe to balance renewable generation.
Cost is not independent of the perception around nuclear though, and its influence on regulatory burdens, insurance, legislation, nimbyism, etc. So it kind of makes sense to focus on other factors. Changing the perception could bring down the cost as well.
Nuclear is the only type of energy that can guarantee a low variability in production.
> But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out,
Nuclear is expensive because of 2 reasons. First, because we didn't build any, we have zero momentum savings. Second, it is expensive because we make it expensive. Nuclear has to be orders of magnitude safer than any other form of energy. If raw material mining for solar had the same kind of limitations (per human-year lost), then solar would be prohibitively expensive too. If disposal of waste (pollution) for coal/natural gas was as stringent (adjusted to human years lost), then they too would be prohibitively expensive. Nuclear costs are technically quite low. We have scared ourselves into making it so expensive that it is impossible to build.
> wind + solar
You conveniently mention the 2 form of electric production that nuclear does not compete with. Consistent-electricity comes in the form of petroleum, hydro-power and nuclear energy. We need consistent energy. Nuclear replaces petroleum and hydro-power, both of which are significantly worse for the environment and cause much higher median and worst-case loss of life than nuclear energy. If we could build nuclear power plants with the sort of carelessness that coal and hydro-power plants are, then nuclear would've been the dominant form of consistent energy production.
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My suspicion is that the lack of nuclear powerplants is because of perverse economic incentives for countries with uranium supplies. The nations with the largest uranium reserves [1] are either already oil/coal producing countries and do not need uranium disrupting their own economy (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Australia, South Africa) or do not have the technological knowhow to execute on a nuclear power plant (Namibia, Niger).
The exceptions are China and India, both of which therefore pushing for more nuclear power. [2] [3] "Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome".
> It's 2023, there's an energy crisis on. Where are the new nuclear plants in Europe? Where are the GW of power saving us from rolling blackouts in Europe? Nuclear is a no show. It didn't happen. Not even a little bit. It didn't matter.
I think this is a rather inaccurate characterization and we need to be a bit more nuanced here. I'm going to address this out of order, and first with the power shortage.
Power shortage:
I'd actually argue that nuclear power played an extremely important role since the invasion of Ukraine. Remember that France is the second largest exporter of electricity in Europe[0], just a hair behind Germany (#3 (Sweden) is half of #2, number 4 is half of #3) (it is also worth considering that France's electricity is almost an order of magnitude lower in emissions[1]). It is also worth considering which countries were reliant upon Russian gas, and France had low reliance whereas Germany had a high dependency[2,3] and remember that Europe would still be importing gas from Russia if they could[4]. Germany also had increased reliance on Russian gas over the last 20 years, and had a sharp increase in gas intake post 2011 (Fukushima)[5].
So let's put it this way: Europe hit a energy crisis where Russian gas played a major role[6] (but to be clear, not the only). Who picks up the slack? What what does that country use to generate most of its electricity?
Lack of plants:
A problem here is that in Europe only a handful of plants have gone into operation in the last 20 years. Ukraine got two (2005 and 2006), Romania got one in 2007, Belarus got one in '21, Finland got one a week ago, and that's it. 5 reactors in 20 years[7]. The majority of the existing reactors came online in the 80s. Yes, there's been several proposals but nuclear power has long been politically contentious, especially in Europe. See Germany who only even considered stopping their shutdowns (which were politically motivated) due to the power crisis. You'll notice that most environmental scientists suggest shutting down all fossil fuels before nuclear, but this was not the path taken. While yes, this does technically mean that you're right in that nuclear didn't come to the rescue but I'd argue that this is akin to saying that a hammer isn't useful in woodworking because you never took it out of the toolbox. This is not the same as (properly) using the hammer and it failing to meet the demands of the task. Or maybe a different analogy we can say is that it is unfair to claim a consumable resource (plants need to be replaced, including renewables) is useless when you do not replace that resource for decades. We're not going to talk about costs of plants because I expect everyone on HN to understand scale, momentum, and working knowledge are all significant factors.
Now there is another factor that plays an important role, and this conversation can't happen in good faith without mentioning it: France's "nuclear crisis"[8]. This was an unfortunate event and a "perfect storm" if you will. So we know most of these reactors have been operating since the 80's, it is only natural to expect repairs. Unfortunately in early 2020 there was a global pandemic and in response many planned outages were delayed or reduced in 2021[9], with the expectation that a lot of the slack could be picked up in 2022. Unfortunately, a certain country invaded another country and the invading country had an control over one of the major power sources of that Europe.
Conversations about nuclear power are often terrible online. Neither the nuclear bros nor the anti-nuclear bros are arguing from a scientific perspective. Both climate and nuclear energy are incredibly complex and nuanced issues. First order approximations are not "good enough" and what many claim is "common sense" or "obvious" isn't (and obvious post hoc isn't obvious in situ). To be clear, the scientific consensus has been to focus on renewables but not take nuclear off the table (note that this is not the position you find either camp arguing for online). While nuclear bros often advocate for high levels of nuclear power, no reasonable energy/climate scientist would suggest this. Similarly, no reasonable energy/climate scientist will say that nuclear should be rejected while we're still using fossil fuels (the argument is if we need nuclear or not for a future world of zero carbon energy production, but this is highly nuanced). Nuclear bros argue for thorium breeder reactors due to their lower waste levels and proliferation risk, not knowing that these are not major concerns in the community and can be solved in other ways. Anti-nuclear bros argue about cost but ignore the build-out issue, history, progression of nuclear technology, and the polarizing political sphere surrounding the issue. While I am certain that most, if not all, these comments are well intentioned and people are trying to make the world a better place, that does not mean that the arguments are being done in good faith (high confidence + low domain knowledge = bad faith).
I frequently argue (including here on HN) that this over confidence and tribalism prevents actually resolving these issues. I've provided a lot of resources here and I think everyone should be careful in how they discuss complex subjects online. I understand that many of you are passionate, but make sure that this passion isn't tribal. If you're really passionate about something then you'll invest a proportional amount of energy to learn about the subject. Are you passionate about fixing problems or expressing you opinion? Are your opinions able to be changed or are you just "educating" others? We live in a highly specialized world, it is not a demerit on your intelligence to not be knowledgeable in a specific domain, but it is to speak confidently about domains you have no expertise in. Let's all try to encourage this behavior and hold ourselves to high standards. This happens in every nuclear thread and I hope we can learn to be better than Reddit.
There's this pesky thing called cost that nuclear proponents just refuse to address. They are all scientific about how nuclear works. How great it is. Etc. But when it comes to cost, they suddenly check out, go hand wavy, and generally refuse to talk numbers. You could do this, you could do that. But nobody really likes being put on the spot about what exactly to do for how much.
Not a single dollar sign in this article nor the string "dollar". Or other common currency such as "Euro". There's nothing else to be said about this article. It just completely ignores cost. It's all hand wavy and devoid of facts about cost. Very typical. Must be deeply embarrassing to read such drivel for an actual nuclear physicist with a clue. Guilty by association and it's not a good look. If these are your biggest fans, you are royally screwed.
The whole argument for nuclear evaporates as soon as you bring up cost. Then it's suddenly about such pesky things as $/mwh and delays, budget overruns, etc. And the fact that there are things you can buy and install that have very well known $/mwh cost that work as advertised.